


After Party Blues

by 11dishwashers



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M, Roommates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-17 21:32:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13667700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/11dishwashers/pseuds/11dishwashers
Summary: Jungwoo would like his new flatmate a lot more if he didn't have a crush on him.





	After Party Blues

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [NCTprompts](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/NCTprompts) collection. 



> For this prompt; Jungwoo finds his new flatmate quite cute and they also get along well, except Yukhei keeps setting off the fire alarm at 3 AM.
> 
> thanks to the prompter<33 i loved writing jungwoo for the first time !

Jungwoo was clear in regards to the placement of The Line. What he'd skirted about for the first few phone calls, he'd attempted to slip into the conversation with all the tell tales of casual kryptonite. As expected, The Line made every word that followed it ugly, hot rocks fluctuating the temperature of each new gesture, sentence, widening of eyes and mouths agape in _audacity_. All the previously endeared tenants had left for better slots about campus, rip out numbers that weren't as tacky as the one he'd reworked from google.His number had a lot of eights in it, a lot of thirteens- this was why Kun claimed he wouldn't find a flatmate until well past November, when his heating bill would do the inevitable and slice its way through the rent money, eyes hovered above a horoscope article.

Yukhei arrived as a lesson learned. He was young in his brain as well as his baby fat, and his jumpers were all black and ribbed and tarnished with the occasional ginger cat hair. He'd gone on a tangent the first time they'd appeared before each other, in some arthouse cafe that leeched off the student population about the area, and since they were finance majors the hookup culture hadn't integrated itself within the bathroom cupboards of everyone yet, and thus the dating culture was booming until it became a viable market; as a business major himself, Jungwoo had taken some sloppy, half hearted notes in regards to the green tints on valentine's day and the friday leading up to it. Yukhei had rattled on about the alleged laziness of the family's beloved housecat for seconds on end. If not for his ass, Jungwoo would've drawn to the waiters for entertainment. He pointedly did not bring up The Line. Within the constraints of their college lifestyle, he felt very much like he was leading a pig to the chopper and an innocent soul to a bulletproof heart. It was an exclusive display of Jungwoo and he wasn't one to turn the feathers early- all Yukhei needed to know that the visible side glimmered. At some point, The Line had lost its way to the priority pedestal, where it had been placed for most of the time on his own. At the counter, they'd both gravitated towards the high caffeine levels, and Yukhei had made an attempt to spin this into a fond mini-me type situation, wherein he was the apprentice of lifestyles with his bright blue(they were black in real life, as was expected of the picture of a borderline-stereotypical Chinese youth) eyes scanning Jungwoo's form for direction rather than intrigue. Or, any intrigue was under the pretense of humble admiration in the career lane. Big brother. Jungwoo neglected to bring up the fact that he saw caffeine as an alcohol substitute, and was too aware of his own coping mechanism to wave it off as a natural preference. He went home that night feeling fed, though he hadn't eaten all day- the upside was that Yukhei was attractive in that vaguely impish structure, and the downside had been locked out of the house so it rotted in the cold. If he craned his neck out the bedroom window, he'd see its nastiness, and this was the whole big brother dynamic that Yukhei had cemented between them within seconds. It was reminiscent in a weird way, of when Jungwoo himself had worked hard to form this relationship with his upperclassman, Lu Han, during his high school days, when he had yet to realise that romantic attachment towards men was within a healthy man's capacity.

As expected considering the trajectory of their conversation, Yukhei moved in the next week. A lady dropped him off before the complex, dents on the bonnet of her car left in the September shade. He'd met Jungwoo in the lobby, and because of his mere presence, Jungwoo was pressed to carry one of the industrial sized cardboard boxes up five flights of stairs because the elevator was in order- this meant it remained static. The lady came out of her car and he sized her up as someone Yukhei had cemented as a mother figure of sorts, but her hair wasn't well kept enough for her to be that old, and he guessed it might've taken its wavy shape through bedhead rather than parlour tricks and hedge trimming and the alienation of split ends. She carried the most boxes in her skinny arms. When Yukhei and her caught each other's eyes passing on the flight of stairs, he said "red skivvy" and she'd crack up into a scathing midsection of laughter. Later, he explained that this was an inside joke that was spurred on by Vic's first ex(Vic was the girl's nickname, but Jungwoo refused to call her that as he felt silly to assume its accessibility, and he didn't know her actual name, nor how she'd interpret its use) when he wore her red skivvy to class to cover- and this is Yukhei's phrasing, not Jungwoo's,  as Jungwoo was a 'classic guy' who portrayed indifference to sex, framed it as a non romance of pursuits- his lovebites. It had inevitability ripped up the sides. He wasn't _that_ skinny, Yukhei said, I'll never understand the reasoning. And so Vic had to bring him a spare t shirt while he sobbed with embarrassment in the disabled bathroom stall. Vic had yet to live it down, despite the fact that it wasn't her fault. She liked to bring it up as a reminder of her ex's stupidity, and to mock him on the odd occasion where she felt inadequate without bringing others down. Yukhei went on record to say he always let her.

After her departure, Yukhei spoke as Jungwoo searched his cutlery drawer for a boxcutter, "she's always been like a big sister to me. We were brought up together."

Jungwoo hadn't known that childhood friends could retain their inseparability- it had never been put in practice with him, or with any of the blank faces he talked to on campus when time was in need of passing.The reality of the situation was that most of his friends had been made through his burnout years in high school, and they lived few and far between, accompanied with a familiar feeling of ostracisation. He'd forgotten how to make friends without the bravado. It was no longer a requirement, but he was always late to the party when social norms were swapped out and replaced, and always clueless towards the way he was received by others. "She seems nice," he said, offhanded to the point where it was directionless. Yukhei made heart eyes at the statement, and its terribly mistaken implications.

"How old are you?" he'd been handed the boxcutter, and was now wielding it to the first industrial box. Jungwoo could only guess where the conversation was headed, and found himself quite fed up with the results, the same old cut and dry matches his distant relatives and friends had pulled over and over in search of matchmaker's glee rather than any functioning relationship. He had enough of making girls cry twice as much as any other apathetic man. Perhaps because, unlike them, it was his own fault for backing down, and this was where he ingested the truth of possessing a bad character, and not the guilt that could be found among the pillows of these girls, hair laid across the pink silk covers. He'd never been a believer in blaming himself- at least not without substantial evidence, and even then it hadn't been the true strays of his eternal dissatisfaction. The case was never closed as it never opened in the first place, and thus it ceased to exist.

"Twenty."

There was an awful, shrill squeak as the cardboard was ripped apart. Yukhei had his impatience in effect and was slashing at everything, all at once. "You're too young for her," he said. Then, "hey, let's get pizza."

This should've been the signifier, and in retrospect, it was as so; they were geared up for a platonic, run of the mill roomate dynamic, which consisted of them feeding off each other's outward conflicts and cutesy anecdotes regarding classrooms and compliance, flexibility when it came down to the numbers, what money could be split what way and who was viable to fish for coverage. University life was forever growing more expensive, and one day it'd fall flat within itself when the bubble burst and each scholar would be coated with the liquid  after-solution, marred and useless. Jungwoo's degree would display his age above all, and the way the economy fucked him over. As a business student, he could do nothing but interpret the world's nature with endless pessimism. His friends reflected this.

Two nights after Yukhei had uploaded his existence to the flat, Jungwoo got a call from Kun.

"What's up Brother Pisces?" Kun said in that typical cringey fashion of his. As a capricorn, he claimed himself to be mild in the minds of strangers but a true card when the situation called for it. This meant, he'd make the occasional crude remarks with the right company about who'd give him the heads up, the clipped and sudden laughter, perhaps from the depths of how perverted he seemed. He'd graduated as a walker of unemployment's road, and had to intern for anyone to pick him up at all. He hadn't done business but the magnitude of his below the dog status had sent harsh words throughout the animation studio, and his identity was cemented as Koffee Boy Kun with such speed that Jungwoo was honestly astounded, and Kun couldn't get his head around it until he could no longer reclaim his niceties and lick ass behaviour. His vision towards China had grown disenchanted, and was now quietly decaying in the back of his mind without any struggle.

"Just got a new roomie," Jungwoo was clipping his toenails on the edge of the bath tub, and he was sure that Kun heard each clip and had conjured up a traumatic mental image of the scene. Ever so often, one would flick towards him and he'd contain a bodily shiver, fearing that one would stab him in the eye and he'd wake up to a dozen mocking messages and newspaper boxes about it. He could hear Yukhei's shitty music in the kitchen, and it had only been two days but Jungwoo had noticed the pattern in Yukhei cooking and Yukhei being loud as shit. He was no good at it, but Jungwoo couldn't be that mad; it validated his disabling of the kitchen smoke alarm. Previously, it had been banished to a misplaced Adidas shoebox upon its tendency to go off when the toaster had its light flashing orange. Jungwoo had lived on toast for a majority of his life, sometimes raw based on an old urban gem of advice which went as follows; if one must go home drunk, one must go home sober, one must chew a sliced pan on the stumble home and one must make a deal with the devil for a pack of silvermints. He hadn't the time to go through compromises with the alarm. It was thrown with such haste that the plastic plating cracked in half when it hit the depths of the bin.

"You told me like, two days ago," Kun said, then seemingly distracted by some blonde 'dame' who perhaps stepped into the adjoining subway carriage, zoned out for a moment. When he'd reigned his mind back in from an impression more innocent then he liked to admit- it was, in show, not a secret that his mind had long since been stained by the sex appeal of women, and their  apparel when it dipped into the red tones, and to get him talking smack, the lack of any apparel whatsoever, but the bigger secret could be found in how he blushed at beauty and froze around it, though he denied this outright(when brought up, so, often) with a crude remark- he lurched back into his eye rolls. "Did you hit your head? We talk everyday."

Jungwoo was aware. He wasn’t likely to forget it anytime soon, considering the amount of money he’d have to sink into a therapist if Kun stopped participating in the daily whiney back and forths. If he had that kind of money, he wouldn’t have put himself up on the scouting pedestal for a roommate in the first place, and Yukhei wouldn’t be knocking on the door, soft with his knuckles braced, _requesting_ in such a polite manner, please Jungwoo hurry up- I need a piss, god do I. Jungwoo put his feet up against the door, cold on the white paint. "Well, he's here." Though, he found he didn't have the heart to sit with his back pressed to the bathtub anymore, and so he moved on what he regarded as his own accord, and it wasn't deep down but still it wasn't treated as a root or a motive, but he was a bit soft for Yukhei's appearance. This was underplayed as he knew that if that was all that could push him to move, he wouldn't have. He hadn't felt affected by a crush in years, not since Lu Han would emerge out of the steam during the awkward, post-match showers in only a towel, and even that would slip on the odd occasion to reveal his waist bones, and he'd ask Jungwoo for a go at his deodorant. Jungwoo would say yes. During the reverse commute out of school in the evenings he'd type away at rookie love poetry on his cell. Something about more than pressurised gas being contained by the deodorant cans; something about unorthodox, 'hauntingly beautiful' forms of glimmer which said deodorant would cause to surface upon the skin. As far as Kun was concerned, and this was the long, inescapable mile- there was no coming back after a middling sappiness like that.

Yukhei was squirming when Jungwoo opened the door, but he pulled out a look of disgust as soon as he realised that Jungwoo was on the phone while taking a shit. Or, that was the assumption. "Yuki, right? Is he an exchange student?" Kun was asking. His phone was some new model, and its mic picked up the voice of the intercom in the distance. Silk Street North, said the android, crackling. He'd be off soon then.

On the kitchen counter, there was a fresh plate of scrambled eggs. Although Yukhei was a bit insane when it came to role models, and the consequential worshipping of them before grade point shrines, his history of cooking made it stupidly obvious how unbelievable it'd be for him to make a dish for someone else, spiritual brother or not. Jungwoo managed to slip by with some newfound restraint, only digging into a few wisps of egg before Yukhei could drench the plate in ketchup- he was prone to do so, appallingly enough. "Idiot," he said, aimless enough to pull a chair out at the table. Yukhei's first year textbook was kept open with three green pens jammed into the spine. He used pencil to annotate, either with cowardice, lack of confidence, or the library rental fees caught up in his wallet and its fishing hook. "It's Yukhei, not Yuki. And he's from Hong Kong."

"Ah, him."

"What, you know each other?"- it wouldn't be surprising. Kun had a knack for marketing himself as a socialite to strangers, despite the already mentioned phenomenon which lead him to freeze up around hot girls and his abysmal work ethic, and both of these went hand in hand with insolence. A summer at the studio and he'd had more luck with the windows help client than the other interns. He said there was one who always sparked conversation, some white cuffed guy called Xiao Xiang who Kun had been told was the same age as him. Xiao Xiang was a looker and used it to his advantage, perhaps unintentionally, but Kun was too clouded with envy to admit this and claimed he was smiling his way into the studio's hearts. The animosity came right off the bat, and allowed no time for them to become anything more than reluctant acquaintances. Kun seemed more wistful over this than he cared to admit. Jealousy was always rooted in longing, after all. Sometimes, Jungwoo joked that Xiao Xiang was what Kun could've been if he wasn't such a socially coded mud eater.

"Vic's little friend," he said, and Jungwoo was point blank surprised that he'd been in her proximity without thinning like a sheet, or even that he knew her in the first place. Jungwoo had seen her milling about the complex when the weather reeled her in; it had always been overcast when she showed her face despite the sun appearing in shreds between here and there, and that thin bone structure of hers lent some weight to the regalness cause that plagued her and manifested itself within approachability. She was too grand- in a way- to part the veils for the average human, the type of flower to be confined to a dresser and a drawing room and the top of the spiral tower within fairytales. But of course Kun had these connections formed out of the ashes of his own permittance. "Is he really old enough for college?"

"Don't make me feel weird," Jungwoo said. Then, "Yeah, I think I saw _her_ around."

"She's a beauty, really. I'd love to fuck her up the ass."

"Lovely," Jungwoo said, bored at the statement. There was only so much you could hear about anal fantasies before they were a common topic, a spot of weather conversation among the rest of the wannabe fratboys, and sometimes the men crowding his Grindr with particular earnest and ugliness combined, an equation that lined itself with nastiness. "What's her actual name?"

"Qian- well, Song Qian. Why? Gonna stalk her on Facebook or something?"

 

Jungwoo conditioned his inner monologue to support him in his formalness endeavour. The first leap of action was to refer to Vic as Song Qian, down to the confines of his brain, where he could by all means be as rude as he wanted; truthfully, he was scared of being the side which cemented affection or closeness. For him to think of Yukhei as a friend, Yukhei would have to file out some paperwork proclaiming the new marital status. This was the only way. He couldn't think of Song Qian in nicknames, even if her birth name had become a nickname itself, reserved for angry mothers or disconnected people with sticks up their ass. Jungwoo wasn't exactly leaping at the chance to become one, but if the shoe fit, what was he to do other than embrace its stiffness?

For a while, he allowed himself the honesty of being jealous of her. Trepidation surrounded Yukhei’s puppy eyes when she was brought up in passing. Over time, it went out like a light, and out of nowhere he began assigning a budget to the flat by the months. It must've been November when he'd banged up the grand idea of sorting through their electricity bills, confined to the table by the bathroom doors in a packed ramen house. Jungwoo hadn't said that they were eating into the budget by eating anything other than freezer dive at all, but it was implied with his sighing as he opened the clasp of his glasses case, slipped the reading glasses on to score the prices.

"The vegetarian stuff's in highlighter," Yukhei said, in awe of the restaurant's inclusivity. Perhaps it was the addition of the new snow. It could be observed that people got antsy when the first layer collected on the ground, laid thin and shining in the loosest sense of the term, if one were to watch the faces of said people when their eyes drew towards a window. Often times, they went wide and then settled with repressed wonder. Snow liked to suck the monotony out of abundant of routine. Yukhei was like this anyway- through the cement and the print of his passport.

It reminded Jungwoo of what Kun had said, something along the lines of, isn't Yuki too young for college? Or is he some brainiac child wonder? It was a tricky one to dwell over. Despite this, it became more and more apparent that Yukhei was one attractive guy, and sometimes Jungwoo worried, when he caught Yukhei in his jocks, pink skinned as he flitted out of the shower, that perhaps it was because of this that he'd gotten handsomer by the hour. Lu Han had a baby face too, as did the exchange student Minseok. He'd crushed on both of them when the hormones had called for it, and a familiar scattering of blood from the brain. "What's nice here, do you know?" he asked, to shoo off the silence as much as out of diplomatic eagerness. That is, the eagerness to feel diplomatic in your own shoes, seated by, upon, below, within your words.

Yukhei was watching him. "Your glasses-" he said, stopped. "I usually get the chef's special, cos it's extra salty."

Jungwoo didn't pry. He found some pleasure in the fact that he'd never been one to do so; he knew when to avert his gaze before it could become an order, and thus prevented himself from hearing what people had the restraint to only say once, just barely, or accidently, caked in sand with no form of extrication, beached whale stinking in its own guts. When the waiter rose from the ashes of a family table, Jungwoo requested for a bowl of whatever Yukhei was having. They'd shared a grin and the feeling of rosiness. It didn't falter for the rest of the night, even with the added pretension of budget talk.

In December, Yukhei had set the smoke alarm off, waking the neighbour's dog, thus waking the neighbour, and then there was a bang on their front door, and then Jungwoo too was awake and alive and incredibly pissed off at both of these facts. The neighbour had selective hearing disorder- not in biology but rather in attitude. She'd rattled on about common courtesy for a good spread of missed sleep before loitering off to do her dog's bidding, which meant feeding it scraps of leftover takeaway duck, straight from the foil container.

"What was that?" Jungwoo said, when Yukhei had scraped up the courage of defense to leave his bedroom, perhaps having developed a confidence in the justice system's rotary methods in the case of self defense. Jungwoo would lunge with a knife and Yukhei would commit manslaughter. His eyes were tireder than usual, but Jungwoo found no sympathy for him through the yellow of his own discounted sleep.

"Sorry," he said, folding and unfolding the belt of his silk dressing gown. It was an import, one which he'd picked from the mail little over a week ago, hands fanned out over the embroidered crosshatch. It made its existence an existence for the past few days, showing up when irrelevant and relevant in relation to its obnoxiousness, the rustling noises which emanated from the sleeves when rubbed along the torso fabric and the shoulders in line, an octave away from squealing but with the expected volume nonetheless. "I needed a smoke, and it's too cold to open the windows."

Smoking. "As long as you don't drink," Jungwoo said, hot rocks and gavel aiming for their usual plunge into his secrecy. He'd put it off for a long time. Students liked to get drunk and he could sympathise to the depths of his reminiscing, but that was no comfort at all. "Please don't drink in the house."

Yukhei eyed him. "Why not?"

"Recovering alcoholic," Jungwoo said, ashamed and hot faced. He retreated to the bedroom before the sympathetic words and promises could form a union. They'd done that a lot before, but accompanied with reluctance and mild superiority. It made him feel uneasy. The inadequacy had been a fact of life, for a while, the shunning of a sober upper from the rest of the herd, no longer resurfacing with grass stains at the motorbike shields on park entrances in high morning. It was hard to say it the way it was, and often times he found his mouth plugged regardless- the words, I had alcohol dependency disorder, age sixteen through the tail ends of twenty, had no place in his comfort zone and thus were thrown out to the black depths which showed no traces of life through the water, no glimmers beneath a flashlight should one seek out such poisons. They were substituting immersion with space heaters and the electricity bill was running on borrowed time, but with his forehead against his pillow and the warmth clouding the air, he found the overcooking of his body rather fitting. He'd be sweating regardless.

How embarrassing, he thought.

"There's no need to be embarrassed," Yukhei was saying, after the first waves of carpet sweeping had been rode out to the shoreline. The fashion mag under his fingers had a perfume tester that had ruined the atmosphere for the conversation ahead, as now all Jungwoo could smell was the new million dollar fragrance rather than any early screening of his hot tears face. It wasn't as hot as it sounded, and was aptly named after how his blood would clot around his eyes, purple through his veins. That was how we was when he got ashamed beyond defensiveness. There was no defense for it then, as it wasn't something which people believed should be defended in the last cycle of its runtime as an ongoing era.

He'd been avoiding Yukhei, 'mildly'. Kun thought it was stupid and immature of him, and had invited him bowling in what was dressed as a pick-me-up but was rather a chance to thread his loose ends together into a friend group. Some guys from his class would be there. Maybe a token girl too, should Kun figure out a method of cheating, allowing all x's on his printed scoreboard, and by the end of the night, his frayed mattress- no sheet. He had a sex playlist; a Get Lucky one. It consisted of the secondary singles on all of The Weeknd's albums, for he hadn't considered that though the lyrics were indeed sexual, the appeal of it wouldn't inherently follow skin.

Jungwoo said no. He was taking his chance to mope, to become the settled drama queen who was too fragile and unrelatable to be called out for it. He didn't go out for three days, and then Yukhei had tried to catch him out into some familiar conversation about the tv season for a while before giving up on his dismissiveness. Jungwoo started listening to the Carpenters again, thought about getting drunk- but he'd do that anyway, in shambles and deceived by what was said to be the great pleasures in life. He had this recurring dream, that he'd come home drunk and Yukhei would be organising a beanie baby collection- or something of a similar magnitude of lameness- on the sitting room's coffee table, and Jungwoo would confess that one, he was gay and two, he had some minor hang ups about dating Yukhei due to how uncool Yukhei's interests really _were_. Not that they'd date anyway. Yukhei may've had twelve fashion mag subscriptions but Jungwoo knew better than to trust stereotypes, as he himself had never cared for fashion or well kept hair in his life.

This continued until Yukhei caught him out- he _cooked dinner._ Sunday roast, chicken manicured with foil and roast potatoes and unappealing clumps of broccoli straight from the only stainless steel pan they owned. When Jungwoo could no longer ignore the formalness within him, he sat across from Yukhei and they began digging each other's early grave, as that seemed to be the case when it came to dining with prospective love interests.

That was when Yukhei said it. "There's no need to be embarrassed."

No, but he was anyway. "We're students," Jungwoo said, trying to make an incision on the overcooked chicken. "We like to go out. Smoke and that. Sometimes drugs."

"I wish I could quit smoking," Yukhei said, smiling. He smiled for the rest of the dinner in a similar fashion, using psychological warfare to manipulate all the broccoli onto Jungwoo's plate- it was so steamed it began melting into green, watery, abhorrent paste.

Jungwoo called Kun up later and said, yes I'd like to go bowling, but you're paying.

 

It was a year before Jungwoo's heart caught up with him, at death's door with its eyes closed, satin wrapping the veins, and the inside of his coffin was a lovely pink colour that exposed its high end origins beneath flood lights, wherein it'd shine.

And it killed him. It really did.

Who would've thought; Jungwoo of all people, death by unrequited love. It was as cheesy as it was painful, almost, though they never surpassed one or the other in laps, forever parallel in the attention he paid to them. It almost made him want to get sick.

 _Resist_.

It really came down to the eyes. Jungwoo's, glassy more often than not, drawn to the inoffensive. Yukhei saw him as a big brother; this much was obvious.

"Tell me," Yukhei said over his cornflakes, almost buck naked in reminiscence of a girl applying lip gloss in front of a guy. For all he clung, it became more apparent by the day that it was a dead connection above all else, for the sake of peace within the flat they'd formed a friendship which functioned as any other would, and still Jungwoo was mystified as to its existence in the first place, never one to find himself in such situations when he'd had the same old Kun on his leash for five years now. When Yukhei sat facing North so the sun hit him through the window, his eyes shined like Lu Han's. Jungwoo was beginning to notice these similarities between them, but he was carrying enough lead as it was that his spine couldn't be curved anymore. "What do you think of Vic? She seems interested. Guess I was wrong about the age gap thing."

**Author's Note:**

> sorry lol


End file.
